Chapter Twenty-Two

When Joe Morris took the call at the Daily Mirror police rounds desk on 23 April 1963, he thought it was a hoax. ‘At first I thought the bloke was a nut case,’ Morris said. ‘He reckoned that he had just talked to a dead man in the street. He said that he had been to the police twice and they didn’t believe him. That’s why he rang the Mirror.

‘After talking to him for a while I started to believe that there might be some truth in it, so I arranged to have a chat with him that afternoon,’ Morris said. ‘He was a decent young fellow. He said that his name was John McCarthy and that he worked as a mail sorter at the Ship Section Mail Exchange Branch at Alexandria.

‘He said that he first met this dead bloke, Allan Brennan, when he [Brennan] came to work at the mail sorting section in April 1961,’ Morris said. ‘He said that Brennan was a really strange guy who didn’t talk to anyone much and was very difficult to get along with. He started a lot of fights with the other workers, especially with one bloke in particular, an Aub Beltz.

‘He said that Brennan was a real loner who had no friends and kept to himself, and that no one was really sorry when he left in October to go into a delicatessen business he had bought in Concord. They all wondered how he was going to survive dealing with the general public all day as he didn’t have much going for him in the way of people skills.’

John McCarthy told Joe Morris that the next they heard was that Brennan had been found dead underneath his shop, and that McCarthy had taken it upon himself to send around the hat at work and with the money he bought a wreath and sent it from his old workmates to Brennan’s funeral. All this had been almost six months earlier.

‘McCarthy told me that at 1.30 on the afternoon of Monday, 22 April, he was walking in George Street from Market Street towards Town Hall Railway Station when Allan Brennan passed him, walking in the opposite direction. He immediately turned around and followed him,’ Morris said. ‘He said that Brennan was wearing a jacket and a white Panama hat.

‘McCarthy said that he called out “Good day, Allan” a couple of times before Brennan stopped. McCarthy got up alongside him and said, “How are you?” to which Brennan replied, “Alright.” Then McCarthy said to him, “Have you got a job?” and he said, “Yes.”

‘Then Brennan said to McCarthy something like, “You seem to have got a big shock by seeing me. Why is that?” McCarthy hesitated for a second and then replied, “I believed you had died.”

‘McCarthy said that Brennan didn’t reply, and he said to Brennan, “Do you want anything?” to which Brennan said “No, leave me alone.” Then Brennan ran away up George Street, in the middle of the traffic on the road, towards Park Street.

‘John McCarthy said that he was stunned by what had happened and went immediately to Central Police Station to report the incident. The desk sergeant told him to come back when he sobered up. He went back again the following morning and again he was told to go away. That’s when he rang me,’ Morris said.

Unbeknown to Joe Morris, a colleague at the Mirror, Bill Jenkings, had heard the same story from a different source. Jenkings’ source, who also worked at the mail sorting depot, told him that Brennan had been sighted briefly a couple of times before John McCarthy had bumped into him in George Street, and rumours were rampant that there was a dead man walking the streets.

With both of his hotshot crime reporters convinced that the story of the decade was about to unfold, the Mirror’s editor, Ian Smith, who had a nose for sniffing out a good yarn, ran the story on page 2 of the Mirror on 24 April, under the headline ‘“Dead” Man Seen Walking in City’, then on the front page, under the headline ‘Murder Theory: The Case of the Walking Corpse’, on 26 April, with a photo of the hole in the wall under the Concord shop where the body had been found.

‘Didn’t that cause a storm!’ said Joe Morris. ‘We told of the sightings of Brennan, the circumstances in which what was allegedly his body was found under the shop, the police investigation and the body’s subsequent burial. We also ran extracts from Mr Cox’s findings at the inquest and said that it looked as if in Mr Cox’s opinion foul play could be behind the mystery of Sydney’s Walking Corpse.

‘Then, on 27 April, with a photo of the gravesite under the headline ‘Case of the Walking Corpse: Mystery Men in Shop’, we told of the sighting of Brennan with another man at the shop on the night of 3 November.’

Under extreme duress from the daily headlines about the case, the Acting Chief of the CIB, Detective Superintendent Bert Windsor, ordered the case re-opened, putting Detective Inspector Ray ‘Gunner’ Kelly and Detective Sergeant Reg Williams in charge. From then on it was one bombshell after another, as the incompetence of the original investigation was exposed.

The first breakthrough came when close examination of the blood-soaked shirt from the pile of clothes found beneath the building revealed 27 holes which looked suspiciously as if they may have been made with a knife. Most of the other items of clothing and bed linen were also found to contain bloodstains and there was blood all over the broken linoleum pieces. None of these had been examined in detail in the initial investigation.

Then police found the numbers N10 1262 written in indelible pencil inside the sleeve of the jacket and on the label of the trousers beside the body. The owner of the handmade suit, made by one of Sydney’s most exclusive tailors, wasn’t hard to trace — the tailor identified it immediately. It had been made for company director William Homer, of the millionaire-belt suburb of Vaucluse, who had donated the garment to the City Night Refuge in August 1962.

From the refuge the suit had been passed out to a Patrick Joseph Hackett, who was wearing it when he was sent to Long Bay Jail on 17 October for a minor offence. A jail official had put the indelible pencil markings on the clothing when it had been sent to be dry-cleaned before being re-issued to Hackett on his discharge.

Hackett, alias John Hackett, Shaun McNulty, John McNulty, John McNaulty, John Dougherty and Patrick Huggert, was released from Long Bay on 27 October after serving ten days for indecent language.

Born in Dungannon, Ireland, on 20 October 1927, Hackett had arrived in Australia as a £10 immigrant on the passenger liner Oromond in July 1955. He now had an extensive record in three Australian states for theft, assault, dishonesty, resisting arrest and petty offences such as obscene language, vagrancy and drunkenness.

At the time of his most recent arrest Hackett had given his occupation as factory hand and his residence as the Salvation Army’s People’s Palace in Sydney.

Although the faint fingerprints taken from the decomposing body failed to match any on police record at the time the body was first discovered, painstaking work now by Detective Inspector Whitehouse and a team of fingerprint experts perfected a ‘human glove’ made from the fingerprints taken from the Concord corpse — when compared with those of Hackett they were a perfect match.

There was now no doubt that the body buried under the name of Allan Edward Brennan was really Patrick Joseph Hackett.

But where was the missing Allan Brennan? ‘The fact that he didn’t come forward only added to the mystery,’ said Joe Morris. ‘On Tuesday, 30 April, in co-operation with the police, we ran the extraordinary headline ‘“Walking Corpse” Mystery; Brennan Alive; Police Ask For Public Assistance’.

‘With it we ran a sketch drawn by a police artist, asking “Where Is This Man?” and a description of Brennan: aged 34, five feet eight inches or five feet nine inches [173 or 176 centimetres] tall, well-built, broad shoulders, well-developed forearms, thick hands and fingers, medium complexion, dark brown hair which may be crinkly or wavy and slightly receding from a broad forehead and a small bald patch on the crown.

‘It said that Brennan had a straight nose, full lips and long ears, a smallish chin, prominent widely spaced teeth and bulging eyes. He walked briskly and held his head very high. He had a deep voice, an English accent and was a reticent type.’

The article went on to say that in reply to a question by Mirror reporters, Detective Superintendent Windsor said: ‘There is nothing to link the death of the man under the shop with the mutilation murders.’ Mr Windsor said that as a normal routine, the police engaged on the ‘mutilation murders’ were assisting in the Burwood mystery.

The nationwide hunt was on for the mysterious Allan Brennan, but at this stage there was no connection between him and the ‘mutilator murders’. He was not even a suspect.